Seven Business Touch Points for BI

Businesses have many issues and decisions that need to be addressed. Some of these are well suited for business analytics solutions. Analytics are being used in virtually every industry in multiple ways and the race continues to find the next new area that can make a difference. What are some business issues and decisions that could be helped by Business Analytics?

1. The most critical point is BA/BI should be the most effective tool to help executives to make the right decision at the right time.  The field of Decision Sciences can be viewed as a combination of analytics, economics, psychology, and philosophy. Helping businesses make better, unbiased decisions is not an art, it is science and should be viewed as so. There is a great opportunity for Decision Sciences beyond business environments, it’s focal point upon how to apply analytics to make better decisions, regardless of what they are, and how to build tools, methodologies and software to help people make better decisions – analytics is at the core of it all. 

2. Increasing the organization's profitability would be the other important value proposition. Profitability is key to running a successful business. Looking at which products or services and customers are most profitable to your business can give you great insights into running a company or division. In certain circumstances, business analytics should also provide a platform for predicting business consequences. Frequently, different business units would have different opinions on a business issue; the platform is the place for testing all the suggested options with predicted business consequences. The insights identified through the tests could lead to an “optimal” business decision. 

3. Analytics-Oriented Talent Management: HR move away from one-dimensional workforce reporting on staffing levels and labor costs, toward more strategic, analytically-driven dynamic workforce planning. it’s been transformed from supportive back office to strategic function. The ability to help set corporate strategy through an understanding of national or global workforce patterns can be a game-changer for organization. BI and workforce analytics can provide talent/performance insight. to ensure the right people at the right position. 

4. Looking for analytics that help them to better predict future business performance. In nearly every company there exist 5-10 key drivers that are truly correlated with future performance. In the past using simple regression analysis could help identify these drivers but the data sets were limited, primarily internally generated. With the tools available today, the data sets that can be analyzed are much larger and much more important, it allows for external data to also be analyzed and used for predicting future performance, identify the pool of possible drivers both internal and external and with the help of today's tools,  the truly predictive parameters can be identified and incorporated as part of the recurring forecast process. 

5. Handling uncertainty - reduction, avoidance, impact mitigation. Case in point is Asset Intelligence being the focal tech-enabled business trend. While technology and solutions are no longer 'very' challenging to develop and deploy, real benefit will be derived from transitioning the management of assets from Reactive to Predictive - controlling uncertainty in business' response to events on resources managed through extensive analytics 

6. Related to pricing optimization analytics, the emerging field of advanced demand forecasting directly affects production planning and efficiency. Platforms that hold the data for demand forecasting are becoming increasingly common. Supply Chain use analytics to predict the inventory, optimize logistic & procurement.  

7. Customer service and sales &marketing department should use BI to measure and improve BPM, gain the insight about the customers' true demand, enforce multi-channel communication channels, develop the next generation of products/service, tune digital touch point in customer experience life cycle. 

One of the most striking things about analytics is its wide range of applicability. In any domain in business – or elsewhere – in which human experts are regularly called on to make predictions, classifications, or segmentations by combining disparate pieces of information, chances are that analytical methods can be fruitfully applied.

Posted in: Business Intelligence